Daily Comment on News and Issues of Interest to Michigan Lawyers

August 2010

08/31/2010

If you love Sarah Palin and loathe Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you might want to avoid Dahlia Lithwick's "The Mother of All Grizzlies" on Slate. Otherwise, regardless of your politics, you probably don't want to miss the piece, which is interesting on many levels. It gives an example of how a legal career can be launched from a single well-handled case -- pro bono, at that. It provides detail about how the law concerning equal rights for women developed. And it offers more evidence of one of the sweetest, richest, and longest love stories in legal history.

The case was an obscure tax case, which Marty Ginsburg, a tax lawyer, identified as promising, but had to talk his wife into reading. When she did, she was hooked. The case was about a contested tax deduction by a single man that would have been allowable had he been a single woman. The case led to Ruth Bader Ginsburg being retained to handled a larger discrimination case, Reed v. Reed, before the U.S. Supreme Court.

There's also a story illustrative of social history:

Ginsburg explained that in the early '70s, her son, "what I called a lively child but school psychologists called hyperactive," was forever in trouble and that she was constantly called in to his school, even though she and her husband both had full-time jobs. "Oneday, I was particularly weary,"* she explained, and so when the school called, she said, "This child has two parents. I suggest you alternate calls, and it's his father's turn." She said calls from the school came much less frequently after that, because the school was "much less inclined to take a man away from his job."

Lawyer James Bopp, Jr., a sort of Indiana cross between Michigan's Bob LaBrant and Richard McLellan, has sued to stop the governor of Kansas from filling a Supreme Court vacancy under Kansas constitution's provisions, contending that the provisions that give lawyers a majority voice in selecting nominees, violates the 14th amendment.

Although he apologized for the 3,500 case backlog, former Wisconsin municipal court judge John Zodrow lost his bid for reelection this year. Adding insult to injury, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has now reprimanded him. In its opinion, the Court agreed with the Judicial Conduct Panel's conclusion that since the judge was not reelected, a reprimand was adequate discipline and was sufficient to protect the public from any further judicial misconduct of this kind by others.

Courts throughout the country are struggling with the challenge of maintaining court services in the face of diminishing public resources. Zoddrow's story reads like a primer in how not to manage a court funding crisis. Despite warnings from the administrative office of the courts about the backlog of cases, some of which were more than seven years old, he refused to address his backlog, arguing for additional clerical personnel to handle the work. And he refused to adjudicate parking ticket stipulation cases in protest, telling Wisconsin's Judicial Commission that the cases "can sit and collect dust until hell freezes over."

08/30/2010

A new article in the Yale Law Journal says that the past decade saw a revolution on the subject of interpretive methodology" in Michigan, between textualists and "purposivists". The author believes that Michigan’s textualists (Justices Corrigan, Markman, Young, and former Chief Justice Taylor), "although drawing on federal examples and Justice Scalia’s arguments, diverge significantly from federal textualist theory," and that, as in the other states, they "diverge most dramatically from their federal counterparts by permitting consideration of legislative history once ambiguity is found and holding that substantive canons (for example, the rule of lenity) may be applied only as a 'last resort'.”

The States as Laboratories of Statutory Interpretation: Methodological Consensus and the New Modified Textualism, Abbe Gluck, 119 Yale L.J. 1750 (2010). The full article is here. (PDF)

Dirty World Entertainment Recordings was ordered to pay Sarah Jones, a Bengals cheerleader and high school teacher, $11M -- $1M for a report in TheDirty.com that she had sex with Bengal football players and had two venereal diseases, and $10M for failing to answer Jones' lawsuit. Problem is, Jones' lawyers may have intended to sue Dirty World LLC, which runs TheDirty.com. Read more at Legal Blog Watch.

08/27/2010

Volokh Conspiracy asked some revealing questions of its very egg-heady readership, and here are the results:

Conservatives had the following responses to why liberals have liberal views:

They lack the right values. 24%They lack the right religious beliefs. 8.0%They’re not as smart as conservatives. 8.0%Liberals tend to engage in “groupthink.” 44%They probably grew up around other liberals. 58%Political issues are difficult, and liberal views are reasonable (even if I think they are wrong). 61%

Liberals had the following responses to why conservatives have conservative views:

They lack the right values. 19%They have incorrect religious beliefs. 20%They’re not as smart as liberals. 15%Conservatives tend to engage in “groupthink.” 28%They probably grew up around other conservatives. 63%Political issues are difficult, and conservative views are reasonable (even if I think they are wrong). 75%

A 102-year old courthouse in Mississippi was extensively renovated, and now the judge, lawyers, parties, witnesses, and jurors can't hear one another. A WLOX story quotes the lawyer who has filed a motion with the court calling for a fix as saying, "The straw that broke the camel's back was Thursday of last week, whenever Judge Lisa Dobson had to declare a mistrial in a civil case because the jurors raised their hands and said they couldn't hear what was being said." According to a juror, "The sound in there was such a bad echo you couldn't hear the lawyers, you couldn't hear the judge, you couldn't hear the witnesses." The county says it's been trying to fix the problem, but protecting the historic integrity of the building has made a solution elusive.